girl recuperating out at Bob's bungalow, and in the summertime all the
stage children she could find came to pay her visits and live on real
milk and eggs.

She interested herself in the girl student colonies in New York, and
became their patron saint. She found that the girls in the Three Arts
Club, and kindred student places--getting their musical and dramatic
education with great sacrifice usually, either to their parents or
themselves--had only such opportunities to hear the great artists of the
day as the top galleries afforded. The dramatic students fared better
than the others, she found, for they could get seats for twenty-five or
fifty cents in the lofts of theatres, but the music students had to
stand in line sometimes for two or three hours to buy a place in the
gallery of the Metropolitan. As it was impossible to see anything from
there, seated, they were accustomed to stand through the entire opera.
For this privilege they paid one dollar. Bob learned what that dollar
meant to most of them, an actual sacrifice, even privation. While rich
patrons yawned below, these young idealists, the musical and dramatic
hope of our future, leaned over the railing, up under the roof, trying
to grasp the fine shades of expression which mark the finished artist.

All this Bob Garratry learned, and raged at. She herself donated
twenty-five student seats for every opera, and a lesser number for each
good play. She interested some of her friends in the idea--with
characteristic fervour she adopted all the students in New York, but
even this large family did not fill the nooks and crannies of her empty
heart. You felt it in her work--"the Celtic minor" as one critic said.
Possibly Paul Trent expressed it best when he said: "Behind her every
laugh you feel her dreein' her weird!"

PART I

"Mr. Trent, Miss Garratry is on the wire," said the stenographer to
Trent, who sat at his desk making inroads on the piles of
correspondence, official documents, and typewritten evidence which
heaped his desk.

"I told you I couldn't be interrupted," he replied sharply.

"I explained that to her, when she called the first time. She says that
if you don't speak to her she will come down here."

He smiled reluctantly as he took up the receiver. "Good morning," he
said.

"What is the use of having a lawyer, if he acts like a Broadway
manager?" she asked.

"I wish you could see the pile of papers completely surrounding me," he